"Lloyd's Jacobin correspondents." This is Lamb's only allusion to the attack which had been made by The Anti-Jacobin upon himself, Lloyd and their friends, particularly Coleridge and Southey. In "The New Morality," in the last number of Canning's paper, they had been thus grouped:—
And ye five other wandering Bards that move
In sweet accord of harmony and love,
C——-dge and S—tb—y, L—d, and L—be & Co.
Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux!
—Lepaux being the high-priest of Theophilanthropy. When "The New Morality" was reprinted in The Beauties of "The AntiJacobin" in 1799, a savage footnote on Coleridge was appended, accusing him of hypocrisy and the desertion of his wife and children, and adding "Ex uno disce his associates Southey and Lamb." Again, in the first number of the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, August, 1798, was a picture by Gilray, representing the worshippers of Lepaux, wherein Lloyd and Lamb appeared as a toad and a frog reading their own Blank Verse, and Coleridge and Southey, as donkeys, flourish "Dactylics" and "Saphics." In September the federated poets were again touched upon in a parody of the "Ode to the Passions":—
See! faithful to their mighty dam,
C——dge, S—th—y, L—d, and L—b
In splay-foot madrigals of love,
Soft moaning like the widow'd dove,
Pour, side-by-side, their sympathetic notes;
Of equal rights, and civic feasts,
And tyrant kings, and knavish priests,
Swift through the land the tuneful mischief floats.
And now to softer strains they struck the lyre,
They sung the beetle or the mole,
The dying kid, or ass's foal,
By cruel man permitted to expire.
Lloyd took the caricature and the verses with his customary seriousness, going so far as to indite a "Letter to The Anti-Jacobin Reviewers," which was printed in Birmingham in 1799. Therein he defended Lamb with some vigour: "The person you have thus leagued in a partnership of infamy with me is Mr. Charles Lamb, a man who, so far from being a democrat, would be the first person to assent to the opinions contained in the foregoing pages: he is a man too much occupied with real and painful duties—duties of high personal self-denial—to trouble himself about speculative matters.">[
LETTER 41
CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
Dec. 27, 1798.
Dear Southey,—Your friend John May has formerly made kind offers to Lloyd of serving me in the India house by the interest of his friend Sir Francis Baring—It is not likely that I shall ever put his goodness to the test on my own account, for my prospects are very comfortable. But I know a man, a young man, whom he could serve thro' the same channel, and I think would be disposed to serve if he were acquainted with his case. This poor fellow (whom I know just enough of to vouch for his strict integrity & worth) has lost two or three employments from illness, which he cannot regain; he was once insane, & from the distressful uncertainty of his livelihood has reason to apprehend a return of that malady—He has been for some time dependant on a woman whose lodger he formerly was, but who can ill afford to maintain him, and I know that on Christmas night last he actually walk'd about the streets all night, rather than accept of her Bed, which she offer'd him, and offer'd herself to sleep in the kitchen, and that in consequence of that severe cold he is labouring under a bilious disorder, besides a depression of spirits, which incapacitates him from exertion when he most needs it—For God's sake, Southey, if it does not go against you to ask favors, do it now—ask it as for me—but do not do a violence to your feelings, because he does not know of this application, and will suffer no disappointment—What I meant to say was this—there are in the India house what are called Extra Clerks, not on the Establishment, like me, but employed in Extra business, by-jobs—these get about £50 a year, or rather more, but never rise—a Director can put in at any time a young man in this office, and it is by no means consider'd so great a favor as making an established Clerk. He would think himself as rich as an Emperor if he could get such a certain situation, and be relieved from those disquietudes which I do fear may one day bring back his distemper—